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Overview

Marion Quirici is a Lecturing Fellow in the Thompson Writing Program and Co-director of the Health Humanities Lab at the Franklin Humanities Institute. Through the Health Humanities Lab, Dr. Quirici runs a faculty working group called the Disability and Access Initiative. She received her PhD in English from the University at Buffalo in 2016. Her research, situated in disability studies and Irish studies, examines the role of disability bias in nationalist ideologies. She is working on a book manuscript called "Fitness for Freedom: Disability and Irish Modernism," which argues that certain Irish modernists pushed for a greater appreciation of human vulnerability and weakness, directly subverting nationalist claims of racial fitness and purity. She has also published on autism and neurodiversity.

Dr. Quirici's courses train students to critique and revise cultural assumptions about disability by analyzing language, the media, popular representations, the law, institutional spaces and practices, and the built environment. Past courses include "Disability and Representation," "Modernism and Madness," and "Neurodiversity, Narrative, Activism." In addition to teaching, Dr. Quirici advises the Duke Disability Alliance, a student organization working to make the college experience more accessible and inclusive.

In the community Dr. Quirici is active in the Independent Living movement, serving on the governor-appointed Statewide Independent Living Council as well as on the board of directors for the Alliance of Disability Advocates in Raleigh.